Llewelyn brings the dying man water even though he doesn't like him at all. He doesn't do it out of kindness; he does it because he feels like it's the right thing to do. Why?

This is a small act of kindness on Llewelyn Moss's part, and it foreshadows what will happen later, when he returns with the water jug. If he truly didn't care about this man, Llewelyn would leave the door open for the wolves just to eat the guy.

Introducing the concept of hell in the very first paragraph puts us in the mindset to look out for battles of good versus evil right away. And not that we need to be told this, but anyone who kills without remorse is probably evil.

Following the first quote, this idea of evil is unsettling to Bell. Not just because evil is, naturally, unsettling, but because the whole concept is hard to comprehend. How can be people actually be that evil?

Did someone mention Anton Chigurh? Oh, actually, no—no one has mentioned him yet. That makes this foreshadowing, folks. It's Chigurh who will turn out to be way worse than the man in prison who says that if he is let out, he will kill again. That's pretty bad. And if that guy doesn't have a soul, what about Chigurh? Does he have an anti-soul?

There's a description of Chigurh's eyes in the next chapter: "blue as lapis. At once glistening and totally opaque. Like wet stones" (2.4.73). What do you think those eyes are windows to? Do you even want to know? Would you even be able to understand what's behind there?

If we knew that someone was the walking embodiment of evil, we'd want to stay far, far away from that person, too. What would it take to confront a person like that? Could that person be defeated? Remember, this isn't a Stephen King novel with a magical showdown; this book is intended to realistic and true to life.

Bell believes that he would have to become a little evil in order to catch Chigurh. He won't do that… and he doesn't catch Chigurh. Is that noble, or is it cowardly? Should someone else be given his job? On the other hand, what happens when you fight evil with evil (even a little bit of evil)? Does that just make evil keep happening?

Bell feels like it was the right thing to do to visit a man on death row; after all, Bell is the one who put him there. Bell feels that he has to go and see the consequences of his own actions. Bell clearly feels a lot of responsibility for what he does.

And there ya go. When one of the first major scenes in your book involves a lawman murdered in grotesquely violent fashion, it's scary to imagine where you're headed next.

As if the choking-a-deputy-with-a-chain part weren't awful enough, this scene emphasizes how coldblooded Chigurh is when it comes to murder. He kills a stranger, yet he's concerned about upholstery. Well, that's what he says, anyway. It's more likely that he just got a kick out of toying the guy.

The body count is racking up pretty quickly, and Chigurh isn'teven responsible for these guys. This was a Mexican standoff gone bad, which resulted in the killing of basically everyone involved. There are no winners in the drug trade. (Well, except Chigurh, we guess.)

Here, there is a strange tenderness in the way death is described. That's a motif that will be drawn in more as we progress through the novel. This strange tenderness calls attention to the fact that death is a big deal, and it's something that transcends whatever is happening on the streets of Texas border towns. Life seems to be cheap here, but that doesn't mean that life actually is cheap.

Llewelyn returns with water for the one surviving Mexican drug dealer, who was afraid of being eaten by a lion or a wolf. But it's not animals he should have been fearing—it's other humans, who are much more ruthless.

Llewelyn underestimates the violent lengths the drug dealers are willing to go to in order to catch him. Immediately after this, they shoot at him and his wife. And this is just a warm-up for Chigurh.

Bell says it's not about being older, but maybe it is. Maybe he's just tired of doing his job. Maybe he's got that old-man fatigue he didn't have as a young man. On the other hand, maybe he's just seen too much.

Um, that's not brown sugar—although for all we know, "brown sugar" might be a street name for the drug. Anyway, this is heroin. Here, Llewelyn makes the key decision to leave it behind. He's not interested in drugs at all.

Oh, but here's something Llewelyn is interested in: money. We can't think of him as a totally principled man if he's still willing to take money, even if he's left the drugs behind. This money is basically made from drugs, and it has blood on it—Llewelyn's blood, too, soon enough.

Bell draws a distinction between crimes of passion and premediated murders, making it clear that for him, the person who chooses to murder deserves a harsher punishment, like the death penalty, precisely because there is deliberate choice involved in premeditated murder.

Llewelyn thinks it's a mistake to take the surviving Mexican drug runner a jug of water, but he chooses to do so, anyway. Why does he make this choice, even though he thinks it's a stupid one?